Langley Field biplanes change military history with 1921 battleship bombings

By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

A Langley Field plane drops a phosphorus bomb on the USS Alabama

Courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command

A white phosphorus bomb explodes over the USS Alabama during a Sept. 27, 1921 demonstration carried out by bombers from Langley Field.

A white phosphorus bomb explodes over the USS Alabama during a Sept. 27, 1921 demonstration carried out by bombers from Langley Field. (Courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command)

On a late September day just over 92 years ago, a squadron of Martin NBS-1 bombers from Langley Field took off on a mission that helped change the history of warfare.

Flying high over the Chesapeake Bay, the 42.75-foot-long biplanes dropped their payload of high-explosive and phosphorus bombs on the hulk of the retired battleship USS Alabama, sinking the 11,565-ton vessel in shallow water.

The convincing Sept. 27, 1921 demonstration of aerial might against capital ships wasn't the first success for Col. Billy Mitchell's controversial Plan B, which just a few months earlier had sent the captured German battleship Ostfriesland to the bottom.

But the repeat performance and the ease with which the Army Air Service planes carried out a task previously thought improbable changed the mind of almost everyone who had questioned the military potential of air power in defending America's coast.

Less than a year earlier, in fact, the Navy had concluded from its own less than rigorous tests near Tangier Island that "The entire experiment pointed to the improbability of a modern battleship being either destroyed or completely put out of action by aerial bombs."

But after the dramatic sinkings of the Ostfriesland and Alabama -- which were followed by similar results in aerial attacks from Langley Field against the retired battleships Virginia and New Jersey in September 1923 -- the naysayers were increasingly outnumbered.

"...sea craft of all kinds, up to and including the most modern battleships, can be destroyed easily by bombs dropped from aircraft," Mitchell stated in his report.

"(The tests) demonstrated beyond a doubt that, given sufficient bombing planes—in short an adequate air force—aircraft constitute a positive defense of our country against hostile invasion."

The success of Plan B represented a remarkable turn-around for Mitchell, whose job as the pioneering head of training and operations for the Air Service had been jeopardized by the Navy's resistance to his tests.

It also led to historic shake-up in military funding, with less money being spent on battleships and much, much more on aircraft, including a new emphasis on naval aviation as well as the Army Air Service.

Still, Mitchell's outspokenness regarding the decisions of his superior officers in both the Army and Navy eventually led to his court-martial in 1925 -- and then to his resignation.

It wasn't until years afterward that many of the concepts he pioneered at Langley Field became accepted doctrine.